


Hollow Out the Truth and Hide Inside

by Morbane



Category: Push (2009)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Constructive Criticism Welcome, Gen, Memory Alteration, POV Second Person, POV Third Person, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-01
Updated: 2013-07-01
Packaged: 2017-12-16 17:31:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/864715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morbane/pseuds/Morbane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.</i> - Mark Twain</p><p>Pushers use constructed stories, backstories, to convince their targets of selected ideas. Hook and Emily project their stories into the future.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hollow Out the Truth and Hide Inside

**Author's Note:**

  * For [amaresu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/amaresu/gifts).



Your name is Emily Hu. You were born in July of 1971; the year of the Pig in the element of Metal. The Pig is generous, empathetic, and indulgent. That describes your mother better than it describes you. Your mother wanted to be as fierce as your friends’ mothers - a tiger mother. She wanted you to be as obedient and studious as your friends - or, at least, as obedient and studious as their mothers bragged they were. Your friends grew up immersed in medicine and the law. One’s a surgeon in California now. One's a prosecutor in Texas. You studied art and refused to play the piano or the violin. You and your mother both worried about everything.

You refused to learn music because it felt bad. The screech of the bow when you got it wrong - and you knew how many years it could take to get right - was the smell of rotten fish. The notes made your vision waver like a bad T.V. They didn’t look for children with synaesthesia then. Now they do.

Now you live in Hong Kong, and the American government has stopped looking for you.

The first time they found you, you were an intern, learning art conservation at a state gallery. You always liked best to relax with paint or clay, but you truly loved the things that other people made. The sculptures and weavings and paintings and arrangements you were allowed to touch held the human secrets of the artists who made them. They held hours and years of patience, frustration, or joy. When you leaned in close to them, hands would twist, or a brush would dab, or a chisel would tap in a precipitate of memory that was like watching a redwood grow in an instant from a seed to a tower. In some paintings you’ve touched, the focus of the artist was so intense that there were no individual thoughts to glean; every session of effort they expended ran together into a single purpose.

The painting that hangs behind your chair in the suite where you receive your clients, in Hong Kong, is a work like this. If the session is stressful, or the object that you are given to sniff gives up violence or foul things, you go to that painting and breathe in its essence. You feel calm.

When the American government first found you, they asked you to look for other people. Not people with special abilities, but missing children, escaped prisoners, or parents dodging child support. You worked with the FBI to track down bank robbers who'd left behind the notes they slipped over the counter to cashiers.

There is always a story behind the story that people can see. A favourite book of yours, when you were a child, featured a character who told tall tales of his life on the sea. At the end of the story, he would take something out from his pocket - a coin, an empty fold of matches, or a twist of rope to hang his tale by, and tell his audience that here was proof - that he'd had this very string with him at the time that it had all happened. You understand that perfectly. You came to understand why that would never work.

Your colleagues at the FBI asked you to give them clues. They had suspects, but no proof. You could give them proof. You could give them the right questions to ask when the criminal had covered up their trail. They asked for more and more. You said no. Then you went to Hong Kong.

The best way to stop someone from looking for you is to be in the last place they looked. The American government knows where you are. But the government of Hong Kong knows where you are too - and who you are - and the American government knows that they know. The United States leave you alone.

* * *

Emily handed the script to Kira. It fit on a single page. Kira took it from her with a casual twitch of fingers, but she blinked as she registered the density of the text. Emily waited. Kira read.

"I thought you were going to give me facts," Kira said.

Emily shrugged.

Kira read the page again, frown lines gathering above her eyes. Emily watched her.

If Emily ever made another enemy like Kira, who could push her motivations around and had a reason for doing so, and if Kira, then, had a need to remind her who she was, it would fall to Emily, not Kira, to read between the lines in the words Kira would say.

If Kira was ever Emily’s enemy again, and turned the little story over to someone else to use against her, they - Division or others - would not find it very useful. It was made up of things that anyone might know.

But the painting behind Emily’s chair hid forty tiny pins pressed into the wall, each of which, if Emily held them close and inhaled, would release one of her own memories to her. The point about synaesthesia was a reminder to protect her sister, who had never shown any of the obvious signs, but who also had Emily’s gifts. The part about the American and Hong Kong governments was intended to reassure their hypothetical representatives while encouraging Emily to bring to mind the last official favour she’d done.

The scripts were Nick’s idea. Waiting, in the new hotel suite they’d booked, for Kira to contact them - jumping like an animal when she did, eventually, call him, from Carter’s phone - his anxiety had come out in pacing and plotting. He had circled around the room despite bruises and cuts that made him limp. He was falling in love with his own plans.

The weakest link in this plan was the idea that it would ever be needed. It seemed less of a plan than a fantasy of Nick’s to imagine that they and Kira, in some future encounter, would need a common story to establish trust, or send a warning, in such a way that Kira’s talent could bridge the gap.

But Cassie’s mother had drawn them all together this once, and Cassie’s mother had not yet revealed her endgame. Kira and Cassie and Nick would be gone from Hong Kong the next day, but Emily believed she would see them again.

* * *

Trying to move past her discomfort with the sentiment lining Emily’s words, Kira let the story sink in. Art restoration, she thought, was a metaphor she could use. Pushers changed the picture, adding details to change the meaning. What Nick wanted Kira to do with these scripts was to wash away another pusher’s alteration and trace the original lines.

There were things in Emily’s story Kira wanted to ask her about, not for the purpose of reminding Emily who she was, but to remind Kira. She wanted to ask about her time in the FBI; surely she’d met with Division once or twice. But that wasn’t in the story; would Emily be unwilling to tell her, or was it just that that part wasn’t safe to record?

Kira felt jet-lagged. Of course, she’d just come back from Tokyo, where she’d convinced the pilot to make a stopover. _That wasn’t the plan,_ he’d said, suspicious through the intercom after the gunshot had rung out.

 _Good,_ she’d said. _We don’t want their Watchers to track us._ It worked. The devil-detail there was _we_.

The jet-lag wasn’t Tokyo, though, it was however long it had taken her to get from Division - and where was that, exactly? - to here. It was the knowledge that tomorrow, they were leaving Hong Kong again. Kira didn’t know what had caused her to make it her destination; somewhere in her erased memory there might be a secondary purpose that had been lost, discarded for the economy of **4100 NICK**. For a good time, call..., she thought irreverently. She threaded her hand through his. Cassie was asleep; Emily had picked up a magazine; Hook was writing his own little weaponised biography. Nick was staring out the window, but he leaned back against her lean.

“Let’s go up to the bar,” she said, thinking of turning the holes in her memory, the side effects of Division’s drug, and the exhaustion all into something more familiar.

Nick snorted. “Tonic, maybe,” he said. “Quinine.”

She thought about pushing, getting back into the old give-and-take with him; she glanced up at him, and his fingers tightened warningly on hers. She smiled. He was still in practice; he still pushed back, drawing lines at the point where she stopped and he began. “I’ll have whatever you’re having,” she said. Maybe she’d steal a glass from the bar, seal it into a plastic bag, and if she met up with Emily in some fraught future, she could give it to her, to hear her say: Here we were together; wasn’t that strange.

* * *

The door closed behind Nick and Kira, and Emily put down her magazine. There was no longer a reason for her to be here. One cup of tea, and then she’d go.

When she was no longer under the watch of Cassie and Pop Girl, the sense of fatalism that had been driving Emily these last few days would surely release its hold. Watchers made for ironic company: the people whose very powers depended on the choices you made gave you the sense that those choices didn’t matter.

Fatalism was her excuse, anyway. Hook’s was different.

She watched him over her tea, its warm vapour painted sharper by the late afternoon sunlight. He frowned at the screen, deleted two paragraphs, and started again from that point. It was a trait she’d observed in him before; always one step forward and two steps back.

Hook had wanted out of the American Division; to get out, he’d made a deal. The deal involved fifteen pounds of heroin shifted into laundry powder, then planted on a judge that Hook’s handler didn’t like. He said it had seemed like the perfect deal; having done the deed, his handler wanted him gone as much as he wanted out.

In a story that should have ended neatly, what happened to his wife never quite added up.

Emily had been luckier in the deals she’d made upon coming to Hong Kong. She had made sure never to find someone if the person looking was less powerful than the person who might not want to be found. She had done many modest things. She had cooperated. She insisted on respect.

Her friend in Texas had subtly let her know that her previous government was also pleased to hear that she played down her talents.

She came to Hook, once, to suggest he help her with a reversal of his laundry powder act; there was a friend of a client whose son’s idea of fun was a wild cocktail of things. “You could make them a drug,” she said, “that gives them a hit; but when it’s been in their system an hour - poof. It’s harmless. You could cure addictions that way.”

“Do I look like a drug dealer?” Hook said. She’d caught him in his most cynical mood. Later, she was grateful; it had been too ambitious an idea for either of them.

But it was Hook who had first approached her. He came by the usual way, with a referral; she didn’t remember now what trail he’d followed. He brought her a ring with a sapphire in it and said, “Did Division make her up, or was she real?”

She looked for his wife in the ring, and gave him an answer, and later she heard he’d wiped the memory clean the old-fashioned way, by drinking through the afternoon.

It was a cycle that repeated, until finally she told him she’d sniffed at Cherie Waters’s things so many times that now, her own sniffing was the only memory imprinted on them; it was as if she were looking out through a window while the view grew darker and the inside grew brighter, until all you could see was your own reflection.

She was no longer sure which was true, and Hook, she thought, had never been sure which he wanted to believe; whether Division’s act of retaliation had been the death of his wife, or the lie that he had had a wife to lose.

* * *

Your name is Hook Waters. You were born in Manila in 1973. You like to travel; you first went to Europe when you were seventeen. You kept going. You’ve always felt like you were looking for someone. When you met Cherie, she said she’d always been looking for you.

You got involved with Division in Nevada, through some kind of commune that wasn’t - hippies and crystals with proof. It lost the shine pretty quickly, but back then, you were impressed by Division’s teams, serious people with serious aims. They don’t impress you any more.

Cherie taught kids to read, but she didn’t want any of her own - yet, she said, so you tried to convince her. It was kind of a game; you’re not really sure what kind of father you’d be. But you were good with kids. You did magic tricks. Division like that. It was predictable.

Cherie liked dancing. You and she went out together. You made her beautiful Cinderella dresses out of thrift store finds, and she said she liked the thrill of never knowing how long the illusion would last. But she wanted to keep the dresses, as well as the memories. You started to buy her things that didn’t fade when you were away.

The last thing you bought for her, you never got to give her. Your old handler told you it was a message. That’s how that ended - and that’s how you ended up in Hong Kong.

You stay out of trouble.

Most of the time.


End file.
